Awake (Expect / Spark Productions) 2011 Toronto Fringe Review

I am so glad I picked Awake as my first show of the Fringe Festival. The venue, Walmer Baptist Church, was perfect for this show that is a tribute to members of the Rexdale / Jamestown community that have died in gang violence related incidents.

The two directors, Laura Mullin and Chris Tolley, did an amazing job with this play. Not only are the stories true but all of the dialogue is unscripted and taken word-for-word from direct interviews of victims families, friends and cops. This is as real as it gets.

It feels like a wake as soon as you walk in. There is a coffin at the front, a podium for the pastor, the altar doubles as a stage and the pews are the seats.

The show starts with one of the actor’s singing “Amazing Grace” and other actors who are also seated throughout the church join in. This really set the tone and the heartfelt voices gave me chills.

Although the setting is a funeral the mood isn’t tense or depressing. There is plenty of great rap, Dancehall, hip-hop, B-Boxing and even some Soca music to break the tension. All the actors play multiple characters and no one leaves the stage so there a lot of cool tableau set-ups.

I should say that this show is extremely personal for me. I lived in Rexdale for 15 years and went to high-school with many kids that have died in gang related violence. Teenagers being stabbed in the school parking lot was not a shocking occurrence at my school.

The beauty of this show is that the actors play their parts with so much rawness and feeling that it can be too much to bear; I mean this in the best possible way. I had to wipe away a few tears myself.

I’m really glad that people are starting to pay some attention to the subject of gang violence instead of looking the other way and writing an entire community off because of socio-economic class or racial stereotypes. There is a problem and it’s bigger than a few bad kids; it’s a vicious cycle that offers no escape.

If you can only watch one show this Fringe, make it Awake. It’s more than just a show and I promise it will change you in some way, or at the very least the way you view gang violence.

There was a Q&A session with the actors, directors and one of the victims mother’s whose life this story is based on. It was great to see that almost every audience member stayed and gave them a standing ovation.

I enjoyed reading your review and am looking forward to seeing the play July 12. I was surprised, however, to see an ad for The Firearms Training Institute at the top of the page. Very inappropriate choice on the part of your service provider or whoever chooses ad content.

Athough we do sell ads locally, and always prefer to have local content up, I just haven’t had time in preparing for this Fringe to get my act together and put out the call for advertising.

Which means, right now, our ads are delivered by Google. I don’t know exactly how it works (other than technical wizardry) but the ads that get displayed are based on some kind of algorithm that takes into account the text of the page it’s on, the location of the person viewing the page, and probably other stuff too.

Unfortunately, ultimately it’s still just a computer program and is unable to determine the context of the words on the site, just what the words are.

I’m going to look into it to see if there are things you can indicate you will exclude or not.